GOVERNORS ISLAND, New York—The newest art fair to crop up in New York City is nowhere near Chelsea. In fact, the land it sits on isn’t even connected to Manhattan — you have to take a ferry to get there, and the artists like that just fine.

“Artists are the kind of people who see creative potential in forgotten spaces,” said Ernie Sandidge, a painter and member of the 4heads Collective, organizers of the First Annual Governors Island Art Fair, running through Oct. 12.

Governors Island, a former military base that was closed in 1996, was all but forgotten until the federal government sold it to the state of New York for a dollar in 2003. New York City and State opened the idyllic, car-free island to the public that year and have since partnered to form the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC). One of GIPEC’s goals is to bring cultural attractions to the island, just 800 yards and a five-minute ferry ride from the tip of Lower Manhattan. Its mission includes opening some of the area’s historic buildings up to artists, who can apply for exhibition or studio space.

In addition to the fair, other artistic happenings the island hosted over the past few months included Figment, a weekend-long celebration with art performances and interactive installations, and “Voyeur,” a photography exhibition featuring images of Figment, which remains on display in one of the island’s buildings through Oct. 12. David Byrne’s interactive installation Playing the Building, which ran May 31 to Aug. 10 in the Battery Maritime Building — the point of departure for the Governors Island ferry — was a collaboration between GIPEC and Creative Time.

The 4heads Collective — painters Sandidge, Nicole Laemmle, Preet Srivastava, and Antony Zito — said they jumped at the opportunity for free exhibition space. They invited more than 40 other artists to participate in the First Annual Governors Island Art Fair, which shows paintings, sculptures, sound installations, and mixed-media works on four floors of the island's Building 114, a sprawling 1930s structure.

So far, the highest-traffic weekend brought 5,000 visitors to the fair, but the event hasn’t generated much of a buzz in the art market. There are no confirmed sales as of yet, a fact the artists attribute to the fair’s fledgling status and the type of visitor they’ve seen so far — mostly tourists who happened upon the event as they explore the island.

But sales were only one of the fair’s main goals. The creative freedom that came with taking over an entire building on the island was a big draw, the organizers added. The artists chose their own rooms, and they were also given plenty of leeway during installation, with permission to paint or wallpaper the rooms. Some chose complex installations, while others simply hung their works in empty rooms against stark white walls.

“It’s a dream for a lot of artists to have an empty room to do their own thing,” said Zito, a portrait painter and found-object sculptor whose works have appeared everywhere from SoHo’s Jonathan Schorr Gallery to the 2005 Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers. “Just to be able to install your own work in the way you feel it’s best shown is really fun.”

Most of the artists in the fair are not represented by galleries, and the works vary considerably in terms of price and quality. One standout is Sandidge’s “Mermaid” series — oil-on-canvas and paper portraits and a large-scale terra-cotta and steel sculpture of a woman in a mermaid costume — which manages to be haunting, ethereal, and gritty at the same time. The works start at $1,500.

Other notable pieces include Zito’s series of enamel portraits, based on a found turn-of-the-century photograph of a wistful-looking woman and painted on found objects; Tine Kindermann’s creepy miniature dioramas based on fairytales and nightmares, tucked into a dark corner of the basement; Laemmle’s abstract acrylic and oil-on-canvas paintings exploring balance, color, and motion; and Helen Quinn’s playful graphite, gouache, and ink-on-paper paintings with handmade frames. Robert Spinazzola is also showing three of his steel sculptures outside the building, silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline.